Cisco Spills Beans on Next SAN Router

NEW YORK -- StorageNext 2001 -- Mark Cree, general manager of storage at Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO), used his keynote session at the StorageNext2001 conference in New York Wednesday to unveil his companys new storage router.

The second iteration of the SN 5420, which is an iSCSI (SCSI over IP) router will be available midsummer 2002 and will have more ports than the current version (see Cisco Pushes Into Storage). Sources say it’s likely to be an eight-port device.

The current box has only one Fibre Channel and one gigabit Ethernet port and hasn’t exactly blown the socks off the market (see Cisco's SAN Blast). Cisco acquired the basic technology for the 5420 via its acquisition of NuSpeed in 2000 (see Cisco to Acquire NuSpeed Internet).

Cree said Cisco has 90 percent of the iSCSI market but that it is still very much in the “early adopter” phase, which means less than 1 percent of the overall SAN market has actually deployed the technology.

The current version of the 5420 storage router is in trials with Komatsu America International Co., a manufacturer of heavy machinery and electronics; the University of Houston-Downtown; and Data Peer Inc., a managed data and storage service provider based in New York. There are about a thousand of the boxes out in the market today, Cisco says.The second version of the box will be twice as fast as the current one and will have more high-performance features, including security, Cree said, cautioning that Cisco won't give out specifics until closer to the shipping date next year.

Could Cisco be morphing its product into a switch? No. Cree insisted it's still a router. He says iSCSI will make the biggest splash where Fibre Channel isn’t installed -- mainly in the low-end 10/100 Ethernet market.

“We need to crank up the iSCSI drivers available for the various server flavors,” he said. Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) is first on the list, with an iSCSI driver for Windows expected shortly. A version for AIX-based platforms from IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) and HP/UX servers from Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HWP) is expected to follow mid-2002. “We have several deals hinging on these drivers coming up.” Cree expects revenues from iSCSI products to start making a difference within 24 months.

He was unable to provide any details on the Andiamo Systems Inc. situation -- the company Cisco set up earlier this year to build a giant SAN switch that will ultimately compete with Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD), Cisco's partner in this market today. “I am under a strict NDA,” he said (see All Eyes on Cisco).

Despite the alliance with Brocade, Cree admits that as Cisco moves into the core of the Fibre Channel market, it will have to face up to Brocade and McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDT) as competitors.“We will build more products with FC ports and there will be an overlap with our partners, but how far this goes depends on which direction they go in -- and we do not have Brocade’s roadmap... Cisco’s plan is to be agnostic to the media and protocols and give customers whatever connectivity options they need.”

Meantime, the long-awaited FC blade for the Cisco Catalyst 6500 and 7500 routers, developed in conjunction with Brocade, is expected by year's end. This will connect islands of Fibre Channel SANs over Ethernet by encapsulating FC in IP. Cree confirmed rollout of the blade is on schedule.

What will become of the partnership after this, remains to be seen.

Cree believes that the uptake of IP storage in big data centers will not take off until 10-Gbit/s Ethernet hits the market. “There are lots of startups developing products here, but it’s going to take two to three years to get into these and then a couple of years after that before it really takes off."

There are a couple of markets Cisco isn’t too hot on. Namely InfiniBand, which it continues to watch, although Cree says the company isn't clear on InfiniBand's message. “We don’t know if it’s a PCI bus replacement or a server clustering technology -- and neither does the market."The NAS sector is another space Cisco plans to steer clear of. “Network Appliance Inc. [Nasdaq: NTAP] and EMC Corp. [NYSE: EMC] have done a good job," Cree concedes, "And there’s usually a Cisco box attached to these devices anyway."

Overall, Cisco has calculated that IP storage networking will be a $16 billion market opportunity by 2005. According to Cree, the company will aim for at least 20 percent of this market, as it does with any new market it enters, which would represent approximately $3.2 billion in revenue for the company by 2005.

”Great. But it’s not going to get there via this little storage router alone,” says Dan Tanner, analyst with the Aberdeen Group. "It still has a long way to go to hit these kinds of revenue numbers."

— Jo Maitland, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch
http://www.byteandswitch.com